May Sarton Quotes

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.

An artist's working life is marked by intensive application and intense discipline.

I'm one of those people that I make a song... then I write another song and then I'm like, 'But this song is so much better than this song,' and then I kind of ditch that song. It's a long process.

I don’t want any of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton—​for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.

A good poet's made as well as born.

The real essence of art turned out to be not something high up and far off - it was right inside my ordinary daily self - If a musician wants to become a finer artist, he must first become a finer person.

Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.

Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.

If I keep coming back to a painting and there's a little something that bothers me, I know I'm not going to get away with it. I'm going to have to fix it, change it, whatever it is, to something that I'm comfortable with, that doesn't make me itch when I look at it.

The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.

A hundred cabinet-makers in London can work a table or a chair equally well; but no one poet can write verses with such spirit and elegance as Mr. Pope.

If the poet spun for half an hour daily, his poetry would gain in richness.

I think that, right now, I am travelling in many different directions in my mind, on where I wanted to be. So much is wantin' to go back, but I still gotta move forward. But I think it's just that I'm my worst critic at all times, you know? And when I make somethin', it may be five or ten cuts later before I actually call it what it is. I've always been that kind of artist. I'm gonna put myself through the sweat for it, because I think, as an artist, that's what made me iller, is the fact that I didn't wanna just put out anything and everything. It's just a process, you know what I mean?

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.

There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.

When I feel something very intensely or deeply or personally, I can go to extremes of self-expression or self-analysis by writing a poem - more than I can just talking to somebody or writing prose.

the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

...Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.